I agree with most of what you write, but...
I think everybody has his/her style. You, drbits, want to write great articles, teach the members and contribute to a better software. It's a noble goal to help members to read and search, but it's not the goal of this forum.
Even if you would like to help members read and search, some will never learn it. Some people are just unable to do it. If you don't believe me, please read hXXp://encyclopedia.farlex.com/analphabetism. The numbers in this short article are staggering and you'll find similar numbers elsewhere.
An additional handicap for many members on this forum is that they don't know any of the languages in the forums. If they are intelligent then they use automated translation services, but everybody knows that the results of these translation engines can be total nonsense or very funny the least.
Also, search technology fails miserably because of a lack of a language independent ontology of the domain terminology. I understand some of the languages on this board and I search a lot every day, but I often need external search engines, a good memory (although I've a lot of doubts about it) and a lot of imagination to find what I'm searching for.
I don't know the number of jD customers. I think there must be thousands. I only see few customers posting on this board. Most customers solve their problems by searching and reading. They also don't care when a plug-in is outdated. They just wait until someone else, who isn't too lazy or urgently needs it, reports it.
I think technology can solve some issues we're having here. That's why I'm looking for a semantic web technology solution.
Concerning the README-FIRST post - what do you want to put in it? I wrote to you that in some forums there are too many stickies that members should read. These forums have become badly structured. The post you're referring to already exists :- see "General Bugreport (7 Viewing) Please read the corresponding
article in our wiki!" This shows that even if you put the information, people tend to skip it.
I've started creating an F.A.Q. but after a while I saw that that it was very difficult to choose the really important questions. Every day I see the same old questions are asked in a slightly different way, from a slightly different angle.
Also the usability of the software can be increased by simply applying standard HMI (Human Machine Interface) recommendations. This would avoid many many questions and issues.
I think the idea of creating several forums per language wasn't a good one. A simple tagging system and a good search engine would solve Psp's problem of having to move threads around.
I think we should support freedom of expression. If people can't barely understand any of the languages of the forum, they should still be able to present their problem.
That said, I agree with you that we should give hints and try to educate people in using the forum to their advantage.